Tagged: baby quilt

With my last quilt, I was able to get my kids to hold the quilt for me. This time, though, I only had the pre-kindergarten ones home. So, I held the blanket, and the 5 year-old took the picture.

I think she did very well, just held at an angle. She is my camera girl; she loves taking pictures. Here are some other pictures she took:

My Sewing Machine

Fabric.

The Iron

and she also took a lot of self portraits

Then, I took the camera away from her.

Here is the machine quilting close up.

I backed this quilt with the nursery rhyme fabric. Mostly because I love it, and it is a baby blanket. This is my 3rd quilt that I have backed with this fabric.

If you want to learn how to do a diamond quilt, I used this tutorial from Urban Patchwork. I ended up making two less rows (horizontal) than she did, so mine was shorter. Before washing, it was 37.5 x 46.5 inches. After washing, it was 35.5 x 44 inches. I think one thing I will do the next time I make one of these quilts is cut the striped fabric differently. In this quilt, I cut my original 4 inch strips so that I was cutting through the lines. I think next time I will cut my original 4 inch strip WITH the stripes, that way the stripes will be parallel to two sides of the diamonds.

And I loved it so much, I have another one ready to iron. And another one cut out. I might try to do one argyle. Maybe 🙂

I used a butter-yellow colored thread to machine quilt my quilt in a free motion meandering pattern. I’m glad I chose the yellow. Light enough to blend with the white, but it doesn’t look stark against the color fabrics like white normally does.

I am very satisfied with how this quilt turned out, and I have decided to try my luck and sell it on etsy.

My daughters were big helpers and held the quilt for me while I took the first few pictures. Then, after they left, my son felt it was his turn to help me.

It’s so great to have such willing helpers!

So, I figure this will be my last quilt of the year. Here are all the other quilts I made in 2010.

Sewing will begin tomorrow. So much sewing. So much ironing. So much pinning.

After all of that cutting, I had to decompress by making a baby quilt quilt top.

Same main idea. This quilt will be a little different than the king sized one I’m making, though, because I have decided to make this baby quilt using a jelly roll.

A Jelly Roll is a group 20 of fabric strips 2.5 inches wide and approximately 42 inches long, usually with 10 different coordinating fabrics. USUALLY. I actually used a little more than a jelly roll. I needed 22 strips of fabric, so I cut two 2.5 inch strips of 11 fabrics from selvedge to selvedge. If you have a jelly roll, you may also need to add two 2.5 inch strips of another coordinating or complimentary fabric. I also needed a yard and a half of background solid fabric. I chose white. From this white fabric, I cut (from selvedge to selvedge) a 2.5 inch strip, two 4.5 inch strips, and six 6.5 inch strips.

Each of these blocks, after sewn to completion, should be 6.5 x .6.5 inches squared.

You could cut your jelly rolls into 2.5 x 2.5 inch pieces first, and then begin piecing them together. I chose to go the easy way and strip pieced my jelly rolls. I chose three strips of fabric and sewed them together, and then after ironing, I cut these into 2.5 inch strips, resulting in these 2.5 x 6.5 inch strips.

While sewing the jelly roll strips together, I tried to make sure that if I put one fabric on the center of a trio, that I put the same fabric on the outside of a trio, that way when I had to match blocks side by side, I was less likely to have matching fabrics next to each other. I also strip pieced the white 2.5 x 2.5 inch strip with two jelly roll strips to make the nine-patch blocks. You’ll notice that each 2.5 x 2.5 white square has a pink/brown stripe square opposite a pink jacks square. That was my center trio.

To make the L shape blocks, I strip pieced a duo of fabrics. You’ll notice almost every L shape piece has a green striped fabric next to a pink polka dot print. That was my duo (2.5 x 4.5). Add that to a 4.5 x 4.5 square and a trio, and you have an L shape block.

The white 4.5 inch sashes were further cut into 4.5 x 4.5 blocks. My two 4.5 sashes only made 14 blocks, so I used the extra 6.5 sashes to make another two 4.5 x 4.5 blocks.

About two months ago, I was sitting in church and the teacher was teaching about church websites. During the lesson, this image popped up:

I was immediately drawn to the pillows in the back. Yes, I wanted to make a quilt like that.

So, I drew up some sketches and ended up with one I wanted to quilt.

But while I was blog surfing, I ran across this quilt and thought, “That was the quilt that is in my head and sketched onto a piece of paper, only this one is real”. Amy from “Diary of a Quilter” had quilted it and had even made a pattern of it. It was beautiful. But you can imagine my shock even more when I saw that she had the same exact inspiration for her quilt, only she saw the picture of this lady and her pillows in a magazine (a church magazine, I presume 🙂 ).

So, instead of making the same quilt, I decided to tweak it a little. So, here goes.

My new sketch:

This sketch is not exactly what I made (I didn’t do the extra square in the middle of the connected squares.)

Here is a detail of the two main blocks used for this quilt. The pencil numbers are incorrect. The numbers in pen are correct, resulting in finished 7.5 x 10.5 inch blocks.

I had a piece of remnant fabric from JoAnn called “Koto,” I’ve wanted to use it in a quilt for a long time now, and so I decided that this would be the quilt.

I made 15 of each block, and arranged them so that the Koto pieces would balance themselves out in the quilt.

Then, I organized them into columns.

I decided to sew them end to end first since it required more exactness, then I sewed the columns together.

Here is the quilt top.

Then I had to go back to JoAnn and buy more Koto fabric to make a back. It’s the vicious remnant cycle all over again.

I had a hard time figuring out how to quilt this thing. I thought about loopy, or meandering, but something in me wanted to make this more geometrical. I could do lines following the blues and whites, but I felt that it needed something different. I had thought of square swirls, or square meandering, but I had never seen it done, and so I didn’t know if what was in my head would look good. And then, a ray of sunshine! Elizabeth Hartman used a blocky meandering pattern on her planetarium quilt, and it looks AMAZING. Thank you Elizabeth for freeing me to do this. I should trust my own instincts. I love how it looks!

So, I bound it with grey fabric, machine stitched to the front, hand stitched to the back. Before washing, this quilt was 45 inches by 53 inches. After washing, this quilt was 42.5 inches by 50 inches. This time, my fabric was pre-washed. That’s still shrinking 6%. I used “Warm and Natural” batting, which says on the package that it doesn’t need to be pre-washed and dried and that it won’t shrink. Well, I’m going to guess that it does. But, no matter, I love it!

Here is the back, upside down 🙂

The other fabrics used in this quilt include the green from the bus quilt, an orange from the next quilt I post, a red from a fat quarter, and a square of Kona Maize.

I finished a quilt that I was making for a neighbor having their first boy.

I had purchased this Jelly Roll half off at JoAnn.

I wanted to test and see how far one jelly roll could go. Could it make the whole front of a baby quilt? I didn’t want to just do a stripe quilt, so I thought I would mix it up by sewing them together on an angle. I drew lines 2 inches from one end of each strip. This is where I would place the next strip to be sewn.

Then, I cut off one side of the selvage edges.

Then, I put this cut edge along my cutting board and cut the sewn strips in a 90 degree angle.

I placed the remaining fabric next to the other side of the sewn strips.

I sew the two remaining pieces together, and clip off the other selvage edge of the strips.

I then added a cream colored sashing and prepared a backing for the quilt.

The fabric in the back is this nursery rhyme fabric, that i love (I bought 7 yards of it! I better love it!)

I quilted the diagonal strips in an elongated meandering pattern and the sashing in a geometric pattern.

I bound it with a dark brown patterned fabric. Then, I washed it.

Front and back.

Here is an image of it close up:

And, since I had extra binding, and a little extra fabric, I went ahead and made a glorified burp cloth.

I have never spent so much time on something intended to be spit up on. But, I love it!

Before I washed this quilt, it was 34 inches by 51 inches. After washing, it was 31.5 inches by 47.5 inches. That is about a 7% decrease because of shrinkage.